Greetings from Critical Communications World 2017

This week we’re participating in the exciting Critical Communications World 2017 (CCW2017) event, an event dedicated to connecting public safety and other critical communications professionals around the world. It is a natural fit and a great opportunity for the independent Sailfish OS. At the event we are showcasing the Sailfish OS on a range of devices to potential new customers, and partners interested in a secure and independent mobile OS. Sailfish OS is a great option for public safety organizations when adopting new broadband technologies, such as smartphones and other LTE terminals.

As we’re here, we also have some news updates for all you Jolla followers.

One interesting new development is starting a cooperation with Finnish technology company Oulumo. Oulumo is the producer of a video security phone Lumo, currently based on Android, and our cooperation aims to power Lumo devices with Sailfish OS.Lumo is an always-on, easy-to-use, video alarm and care solution aimed especially at senior people. Safe living and good possibilities for communication with close people are Oulumos’s targets.

What is Lumo?

The ‘Lumo Video Security Phone‘ connects its users to their friends and family, in a whole new way. The Lumo features an advanced safety technology, a social connection network and a stimulating operating environment that help senior citizens live a quality life in one’s own home. Users can e.g. use pictures of their relatives on the Lumo screen to make video calls between the Lumo and a smartphone – just by touching an image. Thanks to Oulumo’s server, the device is an interactive and two-way information tool between relatives, home care, care companies and the customer.

Oulumo’s experience and knowhow in safety technology makes this project very interesting for us, as our ambition is to power different kinds of secure operating system needs with our independent and open Sailfish OS.

Tuomo Sihvola, co-founder and director of Oulumo Ltd. explains about our cooperation: “Sailfish OS is a perfect technology platform for our video security phone Lumo, because it’s independent, and it can offer a high level of security. Our aim is also to take our products to international markets, and we believe that this partnership with Jolla and Sailfish OS will help us also fulfilling this objective. We are very excited to partner with Jolla.”

Lumo demo at CCW2017

Jolla is demoing the ‘Lumo Video Security Phone’ running on Sailfish OS for the first time in Critical Communications World 2017 in Hong Kong, May 16-18. At the time of this post we’ve already done the first demos and the reactions has been very positive – simplicity is definitely appealing!

Juhani@Jolla

Head of Communications for Jolla. International PR & Communications professional. Music enthusiast. Guitarist and band leader in several bands.

61 Comments

a_andreyev
on May 17, 2017 at 2:11 pm

Nice! This is exactly the device I’ve tried to build recently as DIY for my father and grandmother. Even the wooden frame! Very interestesting!

It will show up before end of Q2 which is 1,5 month away. But before that we should have the info regarding the 2nd refund which is approx a few years late by any valid standards. It wouldn’t been much of a deal if the PR Manger gave some progress updates from time to time.

Or will this top dog wood secure video phone handle all communication between jolla and its age…ing audience. I guess I might be really old before any refund news hits the backers.

Thank you for being so enthusiastic about the Xperia project! We are, too! As we have said a in the past, the next update regarding this project will be published by the end of Q2 and we are currently on schedule for that. So you can expect some sort of announcement in, say, June. Our hardware adaptation engineers are working hard on this project and so far the results have been great!

I think Sony Xperia Z2 was the greatest phone for that time, 2014. After, they started to apply heavy savings by reducing everything, including battery. No change in design. It is obvious sale will drop.

What’s next is the Sony Xperia X project and after that is China consortium! Although these two projects have nothing to do with each other and are progressing simultaneously. But according to the plan, one comes after the other!

According to the press statement, “The target is to offer the first release to Jolla’s customers and community members by the end of Q2/2017.” This implies an actual product but you seem to be saying that all we can expect is an announcement/update by end Q2. Is there a timetabled or anticipated date for some actual hardware? I do think it is excellent that as a company you are collaborating with partners to develop innovative and useful products such as Lumo. Perhaps that is the future for Jolla albeit rather niche and a move away from the mainstream products (a “phone”) much anticipated (I suspect) by most participants here?

Expected. Nothing strange. This is a jolla internal project so you now know when next update Will be in relation to a external crowedfunding project where we have no clue whats going on with refund or if/when we will get an update/refund. Big difference!

Yes the target is to offer the first release by the end of Q2 and that still remains our target. The update that we are planning to announce by the end of Q2 is definitely going to include our “way” to deliver the OS to you. It is yet to be disclosed how we are planning to deliver the experience. But what can be said is that we are doing our best to deliver by the target time.

Agreed, I was 100% expecting an actual device by the end of July. The fact that Jolla now claims that they have said all along that there will be more info at the end of Q2 has me EXTREMELY worried that Jolla is slipping back ti it’s old ways of zero communication with their supporters. This is so disappointing

Don’t want to seem negative (and Jolla is my daily phone for years now), but how is Sailfish any more secure than Android (except the fact that it’s so uncommon that is might not be as targeted as other phone OS of course :-)) ? Especially, there is no SE Linux nor Apparmor, no firewal, etc…. Are there plans about security in SFOS ?

Well, I’m not especially entitled to provided design choices on security. But SFOS does not seem outstandingly secure to me for now… I was just hoping for good news on this front, whatever solution would be chosen…

It feels a bit backwards to make major changes to an already working product, but if Oulumo want to do that, it’s their prerogative.

Still, let’s hope that the Xperia news are more concrete than the rather vague and confusing messages that were sent out previously due to the deal still being in the process of being hammered out. Not a huge fan of Sony’s phones, but a higher end Jolla device with official support is a higher end Jolla device with official support. Switched my daily driver to an Android device and I must admit that I do miss the overall UI and gesture control found in Sailfish.

The first display was replaced because it didn’t work right and the second one was replaced because it unexpectedly went out of production just as production was to start. It’s kind of hard to ship a device with components you can’t buy anymore…

I remember. Especially the über long wait for that update. Not a word for several month than the tripple screen disaster. Jolla bought an already designed tablet so I’m sure first screen worked pretty well, maybe not perfect, but nothing is perfect. Maybe the tried the screen upside down. We never no what the issue was.

@tojocky You’re 100% right. (I read your comment twice because I couldn’t believe it at first, but it seems you really are.)

All these announcements in the past have damaged Jollas credibility.

The only problem in your comment is that you cherry-picked the few announcements that don’t fall in the “unfulfilled promises” category. (Which must have bee hard.) The tablet was finished and delivered, although on a much smaller scale than planned. (I own 2 Jolla tablets, so I’m the living proof that you’re wrong with this one.) The watch was never announced as a product. (Don’t know where you got that from.) The Xperia port was announced for the end of Q2, so it’s too early to say anything about it – let alone list it as one of the broken promises.

Much more blatant are the announced Mi-Fone (nowhere to be seen), the announced SSH cooperation (never heard anything of it since 2015), the Namibia adventure (that was 2014, wasn’t it?), the original chinese plans with D.Phone, the official Fairphone cooperation,…

Thank you @ossi1967 that at least now you’re agree with me, even partially. I would be more than happy for Jolla to follow the right direction.

I may be wrong for some cherry-picked examples. By “finishing a product” I meant to sell in mass, not just a prototype, otherwise no point to spend time and money of themselves and backers. I will not go in details of each ones.

I tried do not mention other projects in collaboration with because it may not be Jolla fault.

Hi @tojocky @ossi1967 and others. Good discussion here, thanks for being so active! Just wanted to chip in to remind you that even though many of our announced projects/initiatives seem to have “failed”, this is not the entire truth – there are many players in the projects, and many decisions are not always on our end. E.g. official Fairphone support is currently on their desk (pls push this in their channels!), mi-Fone did not happen at the time, because of their internal challenges, Namibia adventure did happen (we shipped Jolla phones to them), the Tablet project changed because of investor pressure etc. I understand that you sometimes feel frustrated about some topics, and rightfully so. But we are a very small team, and I can assure you that we’re doing our best here.

@JuhaniLassila I understand it’s not always only Jolla’s failure or theirs alone. (And that’s not what I said, btw.)

But in the past there were so many announcements that obviously happened too early. It felt like representatives of Jolla and company XY got to know each other at a hotel bar during MWC, talked about “Hey, wouldn’t it be nice to… one day, your know, sure.” and Jolla were already on their way to write the press release right when they were back in the hotel room.

Public announcements should be made when things are more certain. Yes, it may happen that a partner pulls out of a deal in the last minute. Still, I find it fascinating how Jolla manages to reliably find such partners whereever they go.

Oh, and concerning the tablet:
“The Tablet project changed because of investor pressure”
Have we read this version of the story before? It was like common understanding that some of the decisions around the tablet came from the investors, not from the managers. (Some of the coincidences were just too obvious.) But I cannot recall reading it so clearly in an official channel.

Thank you @JuhaniLassila for your comment. I tried do not mention other projects in collaboration with others because of the same reason.

I care most of the tablet project because I trusted you too much and didn’t only invested in the tablet, but also started to spend time in exploring the Sailfish OS, as it was advertised “A truly open source OS”.

I ended up that the tablet never arrived (most of the backers), the full refund was not made and the OS is actually closed source with some promising to be open. The motto was changed to something “A people powered OS”, which is obvious, OS is written by people, not by itself.

Investor just moved the pressure to us and destroyed the “Jolla” reputation a lot.

@SchröpfeMich Tojocky lied when he wrote the OS was “closed source”, becaue 81% are not. It might be equally wrong to claim the OS is free software (because 19% are not). It’s almost never either/or, black or white. And you know that.

Your question is nonsense. There’s no “border”, we don’t need to draw a line at 48.8374%. From the earliest days of mobile devices based on GNU/Linux, we had to live with compromises. The question has always been: How free can a device be and still work as a daily driver. Ubunutu, for example, was almost comletely FLOSS IIRC and is the sad example of how such a system failed. (I mean “failed” as in “was unusable as a daily phone”, not as in “Shuttleworth killed it”.)

Hi @ossi1967, I don’t mind about dalvik vm and other services. I would prefer to be optional if I want to install it or not. I concern most about the core apps likes: phone, messages, people (contacts), calendar, lock screen, etc. https://sailfishos.org/about/

I think more or less Google did it, except proprietary drivers. They moved their closed source service apps to gapps

@tojocky I’m not sure if I understood your last paragraph about Google’s core apps. In my world those proprietary apps and their total integration (it’s impossible to use Android without Google Services) finally ruined what was left of Android as a once half-open OS. (“Half”-open because of the Apache licensing which makes it legal for everybody to ship a non-free version of Android. I don’t consider Apache a decent license.)

> The tablet was finished and delivered, although on a much smaller scale than planned.

Once again, very amusing way of thinking. What is, in your opinion, the border between unfulfilled and fulfilled promise? Would you still say that “the tablet was finished and delivered, although on a much smaller scale than planned”, if exactly one tablet was manufactured?

Also, how would your answer change if this one tablet would have ended not in your hands, but instead in e.g. mine?

@SchröpfeMich I’d be very pleased had it ended up in your hands because there would be a good chance you would have stopped whining. See, I paid during the crowdfunding campaign to support Jolla as they (and at that time: Ubuntu) were the last ones to offer a mobile OS based on GNU/Linux. That’s the idea I want to support. I don’t have much practical use for a tablet. I use mine every now and then, but I could very well live without them. Therefore, it really don’t matter if I got one or not.

The other question is just as absurd as what you asked above: If they produced and delivered even only one tablet, how could anybody claim the project wasn’t finished? There’s one tablet as proof. I mean, it’s like constructing the other extreme: They built 5 million tablets but sold only one because of low demand. Whats the difference?

Critical Communications World is the leading and most influential congress and exhibition dedicated to connecting critical communications professionals for three days of thought provoking discussion, debate and networking. I think it is a great information for our readers at master thesis paper writing service. Thank you for sharing!

I would just like to clarify few things in regards of this co-op and also discussions here from Oulumo team point of view.

First of all, the announced product will use pretty much the standard SailFish OS as a base. In other words, Jolla team is not putting effort to “yet another new stuff”, but Oulumo is going to be just a normal Jolla’s manufacturer customer bringing hopefully good business to Jolla (and of course to Oulumo too) one day.
Secondly, the reasons why we would like to add SailFish based product to our product line are following:
- even though now we are “always-on, always accessible, super easy to use video phone with alarm for elderly, their families and professional caretakers” we will increasingly head towards transmitting and analysing wellbeing and health sensor info thru our solution. For this we believe we will need total control of the data handled by devices (=cannot agree in use of OS to give any rights to data to anyone else),
- in order to go wider and deeper with functionalities and also have optimised control of the devices’ HW/SW setup, we need to be able to access real people in the core areas of the product: Jolla team sits here in Finland and we know them which is quite different than to work with giants.

And then again, we are a small young startup trying work as dynamically as possible, so have mercy when we do stuff that might seem awkward – we are doing our very best to try to improve world with our small efforts

Got an e-mail from PayPal few days ago, saying that my credit card has expired. The same card I used to crowdfund the Jolla Tablet.
Soon I will forget that there was a Jolla Tablet project or did I had any part of it.

Read about the Lumo, got to know about the new social connection network which is also a safety technology for people. People are scared nowadays from social sites that their information would be shared with someone, but the Lumo has a safety option so no need to worry.